[shiandow]

That is amazing. My main doubt would be how future proof this is. Does it wrap numpy? Or something equivalent? Does it require continuous development to keep up?

Also I both understand the need for declaring the matrices up front and think it's a bit of a shame that it is not seamless.

Here are some (ill-advised?) alternatives:

    X, Y, Z = dp.Slots()
    
    with dp.Slot() as X:
        ...
    
    import dp.Slot as new
    X = new['i','j'] = ...

    X = dp['i','j'] = ...

[dynm]

(author here) This wraps JAX and JAX's version of NumPy. It would surely require some development to keep up, although it's quite short and simple (only 700 lines), so I don't think it would be a big burden. That said, I should be clear that my goal here is just to show that this is possible/easy, and possibly inspire existing array packages to consider adding this kind of syntax.

I like your alternatives! I agree that having to write

  X = dp.Slot()

before assigning to X is unfortunate. I settled on the current syntax mostly just because I thought it was the choice that made it most "obvious" what was happening under the hood. If you really want to, you could use the walrus operator and write

  (X := dp.Slot())['i','j'] = ...

but this cure seems worse than the disease...

Actually, doing something like

  X = new['i','j'] = ...

could simplify the implementation. Currently, a Slot has to act both like an Array and a Slot, which is slightly awkward. If new is a special object, it could just return an Array, which would be a bit nicer.

[darepublic]

Need transpilation rather than relying on this library being present. I like the idea alot though